A preview of the GNOME Shell environment has been added to
the ports tree (x11/gnome-shell). This environment
is being slated to make its official appearance in GNOME 3.0.

How do I upgrade to GNOME 2.32?

The answer is relatively simple:

To build GNOME 2.32, you need to obtain the latest
ports tree skeleton. This is most easily accomplished with
portsnap(8) or CVSup. Simply obtain the latest ports tree, and you are
ready to go. Then do the following:

Unfortunately, this is not only possible, it is highly probable. There are many possible
valid GNOME configurations, and even more invalid starting points. If the script fails,
follow the instructions in the error message to let the FreeBSD GNOME team know about the
failure.

The majority of build failures will be dependency-related issues. One simple way to resolve
the problem is to remove the offending port, re-run portupgrade or portmaster, and then
reinstall the port when the upgrade process is complete.

List of GNOME 2.32 problems and their solutions

Although GNOME 2.32 is certainly the best release to date (of course), there are
a couple regressions that slipped in, both in the GNOME code and in its implementation
within FreeBSD. Some of the more visible issues are:

Clutter based applications like mutter and a number of
gnome-games, will crash when using Software Rasterizer rendering.
You can check it with glxinfo | grep render. A solution is
being worked on.

Brasero has a bug that it crashes when creating new burn projects.
Premade iso burning works as expected.

PackageKit where ported to FreeBSD. It does have some rough edges still.